


Blue/Gray

by digitalcatnip



Series: Blue/Gray [1]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Alternate Universe - Science Fiction, Codependency, I was trying a Thing, Monsters, No real content warnings but someone gets an eye poked out offscreen, Non-earth planet, Not really a happy ending sorry, Other, POV First Person, Run-On Sentences, This is fairly pretentiously written I'm sorry it's old
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-11-15
Updated: 2015-11-15
Packaged: 2021-03-01 05:46:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,314
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23466352
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/digitalcatnip/pseuds/digitalcatnip
Summary: I want to go around the mountains; you want to go over them.We go over the mountains.---Two people wake up with no memories on an unknown planet and try to rebuild their lives, together, in this place where gods walk the earth.  One loves home, the other loves adventure, and it turns out that just beyond the pines is more than they could have dreamed.
Relationships: Original Character(s)/Original Character(s)
Series: Blue/Gray [1]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1688257
Comments: 1
Kudos: 1





	Blue/Gray

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written in 2015. This is my first semi-long-form original work that I've actually completed ever and it is very much both a product of its time and a source of pride for me as it really kick-started my obsession for writing. It's very freeform and pretentious, but it's still worth existing if not just for me to look back and see my starting point.

I think you were here first.  
No, I _know_ you were here first, because when I opened my eyes all I could see was you, standing over me, pushing the point of your spear in my face, the sun behind your head, turning your untamed hair into some kind of halo.  
You prod me, and I probably made a noise, because you jump back, surprised.  
I feel like I should know you, but I’ve never met you before in my life. And as soon as I think that, there’s a weird crawling feeling in my stomach, because I can’t remember anything before I woke up, yet I feel like there’s been so much more to my life than this.  
You ask me something, and I can’t remember exactly what it was, but I think you asked me who I was, and I open my mouth and say “I’m-“  
And I can’t remember my name. I feel like I had one, at some point, but it’s gone, just like everything else.  
“You’re what?” you ask, tilting your head to the side.  
I shake my head.  
Your drop the point of your spear to the ground. “You can’t remember either.”  
And then you grab me by the hand and pull me up, leading me into the forest, (and I didn’t even know there was a forest,) to this cave that you’ve found, piled with sharpened sticks.  
“There’s…things at night,” you say, and suddenly I’m terrified.

  
“Where are we?” I ask, shoving my mouth full of some pithy red berries you’ve found. You told me they were safe – you’ve eaten them since you got here, and you aren’t dead yet.  
You shrug. “The woods. I don’t know any more than that.”  
I look out of the mouth of the cave, carved into the side of a mountain that I feel shouldn’t be possible, to where the grass turns to sand, then to water. I don’t know how big it is, but I cannot see the other side. Every now and then a slimy wet tentacle rises from beneath the surface, slapping lazily at the surface before being overtaken by waves.  
You lean forward, your arms on your knees, looking at something I can’t see. “I think we’re the only ones here.”

  
When the sun rises in the sky the next morning we begin walking toward it, you holding your long, sharp stick, me with my hands in my pockets (I’m not sure why this feels so natural; I’m not even really sure what my clothes are made of or why they have so many pockets,) and we walk away from the water.  
“So what do I call you?” I ask.  
“I don’t know what my name is,” you say, spinning your stick like a baton (and I don’t think I know what a baton is, it’s just a word in my mind with no image, but it sounds right.)  
“I have to call you something,” I reply.  
“Do you?”  
I think about it. “What if I need your attention?”  
You shrug. “We are the only ones here.”  
“I…want to call you something.” I feel a strange feeling in my stomach. “Everyone needs a name.”  
“Then give me one.”  
“I…I don’t know…”  
And you look at me then, and your eyes are so blue, the colour of the ocean, the water that you seem to love so much.  
“Blue,” I say. “Like your eyes.”  
“Oh, they’re blue?” You put a knuckle into the corner of one, rubbing as though there was something bothering you. “I’ve never seen them.”  
And you’re looking at me now, right into my eyes, and my skin burns.  
“Yours are gray. Like the fog over the lake in the morning.”  
You turn away from me, spinning your spear. “Come on, Gray, let’s see what’s on the other side of those mountains.”

  
The first time I see one, you shove me to the ground, dropping to your knees beside me. I wanted to run, but I couldn’t, my legs would not move.  
It’s huge, it’s bigger than you, and you’re bigger than me. It’s a shadow constantly shifting shape, moving, losing its form and gaining it back, all centered around a crimson glow. From the way you act, this isn’t the first one you’ve seen. From the way you leap from the brush, your fingers outstretched, this isn’t the first one you’ve killed, either.  
Maybe I should be afraid of you. Afraid of the stranger who just killed a nightmare, pulling what may well be its heart from its chest and watch as it sputtered from existence, afraid of the look in your eyes when you turn back to me, like a wild animal scanning the forest. I realize I’ve been holding my breath.  
“What was that?” I manage to gasp, and I sound much more brave than I feel.  
You toss the round, red thing you’ve ripped from its chest into the air and laugh. “I have no idea!” You’re smiling, and I feel a sliding feeling in my belly. “They’re big though, and they’ll catch you if you aren’t careful.”  
You sound like you know this from experience, and my heart aches, just for a moment, but then you’re tossing the glittering thing at me, and I catch it without even thinking about it.  
“What is this?” I ask. It’s shiny, smooth, both clear and red at the same time, such a bright red, like blood, and smoke curls within it, but never escaping. It’s almost beautiful, but I’m terrified of it.  
“I have no idea either! They’re pretty though, and don’t weigh a lot, so I keep ‘em in case I can use ‘em later.” You reach into the bag you keep on your shoulder, laying out three more stones, one by one in front of you.  
And I’m supposed to be looking at them, these pearls on the ground, but I’m looking at you, the way the moon is highlighting your face, highlighting your short brown hair in silver.  
You notice, and you just give me one of your wide smiles.  
And your eyes are so blue.

We walk through forests of trees with black leaves and white wood, and the air is warm, and you look like you never want to stop. We sleep under the stars, ducking under overhangs of rock underneath the mountains that never seem to end, and we talk about how to conquer them. I want to go around the mountains; you want to go over them.  
We go over the mountains.  
The animals around us feel wrong, but I don’t know why. Huge rams with three pairs of horns that curl over and over around their faces, the lean-bodied deer with sharp-tipped antlers and long tails, a worrying number of huge paw prints that you think may be a cat, long-legged rabbits with six eyes that glow in the low light. You leave our camp and leave me alone, and I am uneasy in the darkness, and I feel a stone in my throat when you come back, something huge and smelling of the forest over your shoulder.  
We never stray far from the water, and you stand at the shore, the waves lapping at your feet, staring out over the surface, as though you are talking with someone I can’t see.  
Eventually I ask what you are doing.  
“Saying a prayer to the god in the ocean,” you say, as if I know what this means, but I have only been alive a few rises of the red sun, and the world is new to me.  
You say it is like a bird under the waves, its voice like the distant thunder, but I can’t see anything when you stretch your finger over the water.

The rabbits are the first thing I kill.  
The light literally fades from its eyes as I drive a spear into where I think its heart should be, blood dripping onto my hands, a whisper that could have been trees echoing in my ear. And I’m scared, and I look up to find you, because I’ve just taken the life from another creature, and that’s when I see it.  
Just inside the tree-line, the black dog sits, smoke pouring from where its eyes should be, sitting in the grass, watching me. I sink into the tall grass, like you’ve told me to do when the shadows come, but the dog does not move. It just sits, and watches.  
I turn away from it, just for a moment, and when I look back, it’s disappeared.  
My hands are shaking when I find you (and I haven’t killed any more rabbits, and I’ve broken the neck of the one in my hands on accident,) and you ask me what’s wrong. When I tell you what I saw, you don’t seem surprised.  
“Maybe you have found your god,” you say, tossing me a sharp stone, and you show me how to slice through the rabbit’s throat and between its bones, and its head falls into my hand.  
The gods exist in the corners of our eyes, a fleeting, yet constant presence in our lives, always there, but rarely interfering. You go to the water at sunset, reaching out to creatures I cannot see, and I will sometimes find just what I need in the worn pockets of my clothes, and you will just smile at me, as though you know a secret I don’t. The black dog sits at the edge of the woods as we move to find food, ears always listening, disappearing as quickly as it appears, off to the next beast that needs its guidance.  
And when the sun sets and our bellies are full, you will toss sand on the fire, and we’ll lay on our backs, and look at the stars, and there’s not much to talk about, because our lives began at almost the same time, but my chest hurts when I’m next to you, and one night I realize we aren’t looking at the stars anymore when we lie down together, and that is when I learn that there’s fire inside you, under your skin, and I don’t think I will ever be cold again.  
One day, we go over a mountain, and on the other side, as far as the eye can see, is a field of flowers in colours I never knew existed, and I feel that same pain in my chest, and I don’t want to leave.  
You always want to keep moving. But today, I ask if we can stay.  
And you say yes.

And I want to spend all my time here writing about what we did then. How I felled huge blackwoods with stones tied to tree branches and we built a house in that field, no more than fifty footfalls from the water. How we caught rabbits and rams, herding them into a makeshift fence, keeping them safe so that maybe we would not have to go so far to hunt one day. How we turned up the earth and planted seeds, growing food to stay alive. How we moved boulders from the mountains to our valley, erecting monuments to the gods that we became more comfortable with by the day.  
I want to remember these things when I think about your face. I want to remember the colour of your eyes, the colour of the ocean, the smell of the whitewood leaves, the sound of the birds, the feel of the sand under my feet. I want to remember how it felt to lie next to you, to feel your breath on my neck, to feel your warmth on my skin.  
But when I think of you, all I can remember is the end.

  


* * *

  


It started when the orchids died.  
They only grew where the ground got wet and vines hung from the trees, the dark water almost hidden in tall, thick grass. It was dangerous to walk here, but amidst the brown and deep green, they were a flash of bright blue nestled against the trunks of the water trees, clinging to the roots that grew out of the water like horns.  
I lost you that day, trying to gather as many as I could for you, not seeing the water ripple around my feet, the long, thick bodies of creatures rising up to investigate who disturbed their peaceful waters.  
You were screaming my name across the water and you looked like you might cry. You did cry when you saw what was in my hands, but I had the feeling that your tears were different now.  
I learned why you were upset when we lashed together some branches with the thick vines we cut from the trees, pushing it out into the water, testing if it floated so we could see more of the forest without walking through the mud. Our efforts were successful, until one of the creatures lifted from the dark water and caught the raft in its massive mouth, like a night bird swallowing a moth.  
You didn’t let go of my hand until we got home that night, your fingernails digging ruts into my knuckles. But you scraped clay from the hills and shaped them into pots, drying them in the sun, filling them with earth, and the orchids lit up our tiny room in your colours.  
But they did not last.  
They hung face-down, their petals dry and brown, their colours fading, dying there next to where we slept. I felt like a spear was pushed into my chest, and no matter how many times you told me you were not upset, I still felt it was my fault, that I kill whatever I touch (and it is true, actually, the only time I touch the animals is to slaughter them, and the garden wilts under my hands.) You wrap your arms around me and tell me it is not my fault, but even if you held me for eternity I still could not believe you.  
I wake up before you, like I always do, before the fog you named me after rolls back over the lake, to enjoy the quiet of morning. I don’t look at the empty pots next to you, I just run my fingers through my hair (you tell me it is the colour of the sky at night, but it’s never been long enough for me to see,) and push aside the deer skin that separates our room from the outdoor world.  
The sound I make must wake you up, because you’re at my side in seconds, staring out across the field around us, the wildflowers replaced with a sea of pale blue, from the foot of the mountain to the sandy shoreline.  
“What did you pray for last night?” I ask, and you shake your head. Your god doesn’t care much for flowers.  
I didn’t think mine did either.

“I’ve got the wanderlust,” you tell me one morning. You’re staring at the mountain behind our house, hands on your hips, that spark in your eye.  
“The what?”  
“The lust. For the wandering.”  
I want to go around the mountains. You want to go over them.  
We go over them.  
My stomach feels tight as we fill your bag (and I don’t know how it hasn’t fallen apart by now, it’s been moons since I woke up in the forest, and our original clothes have fallen to pieces long ago,) with food, and leave our home behind, but you’re holding my hand tighter, and if you’re here, I’ll probably be okay. 

Two nights later I kill one.  
It comes up behind me as we’re looking for a place to sleep, and it touches me, wrapping some of itself around my arm, and it’s strong, so much stronger than I imagined something that was only barely existing could be, and my skin burns where it’s touching me.  
My reaction is immediate, out of my control, wrapping my fingers around the pearl in its chest, (and it’s alive, oh gods it’s alive; I can feel it pulsing between my fingers,) and I pull with all the strength in my arms. It screams, a horrible sound that seems to push its way into my mind and turn my blood into something black and poisonous, and I can feel myself turning inside out, just for a second, and the creature dissolves into black smoke, blowing away on the breeze.  
And my legs give out from underneath me, and you catch me under my arms, lowering me into the grass.  
You take the pearl from my hands (and it’s still alive, but not in the same way, and I wonder if you can feel it, and I wonder how I never felt it before,) admiring it, and it may be my imagination, but your eyes don’t look quite so blue.

At first you were eager to see what lie over the peak of the next mountain, leaving me behind on strides longer than I am able to accomplish (always wait for me, though,) but now you match my pace. You fall into the tall grass in a clearing of the forest, stretching out your arms and legs, asking the red sky if there’s anything to this gods-forsaken world than whitewoods and rabbits.  
“I just thought there’d be something more,” you say, your head in my lap, the sun low in the sky. Your eyes are distant. “I guess I was wrong.”  
And we’ve only been gone a few days, and I’m already feeling that ache in my chest, and I wonder what more you could want than our house on the beach, your fingers in mine.  
But you get your wish as we top the next mountain. The whitewoods that have surrounded us for so long become dark in the shadow of huge, black trees, towering above everything else in sight, like silent guardians.  
I feel as though I’ve seen trees like this before, in a past life, but I can’t seem to find the words.  
I feel like I’ve lost so many words since waking up in the forest.  
You forget about me for a moment, sliding down the side of the mountain to investigate the trees, the energy flowing out of you almost manic in your excitement of something new to explore.  
I’m tired, so I sit and wait, and try to remember what to call the trees.  
“They’re pines,” a voice says behind me, wet, deep, somehow a whisper and a scream at once, overlapping itself.  
I start, turning to see the rotten-faced dog sitting next to me, its head higher than mine, thick black saliva dripping from its fleshless mouth. It has no eyes, just empty sockets, but I can feel it looking at me.  
It has never spoken to me before, only ever existed at the tree-line as I ended the life of an animal in order to prolong mine.  
“Chill,” it says to me, teeth clicking as it speaks. “If you scream you’ll flush the birds your mate is hunting.”  
The words it's saying don’t mean anything to me. “My what?”  
“Your mate. With the fur that sticks up everywhere?” It waves a huge paw over its head, waving away the smoke wisping away from where its eyes should be.  
“Blue?”  
“No, it’s brown.”  
I realize it thinks I mean your hair. “No, Blue is a name.”  
“What? That’s not it’s -“ The dog narrows its eyes. (No, it doesn’t, because its face is just a bare skull and it has no eyes, but somehow it still feels like it’s narrowing its eyes as it looks out at the forest.) “The trees,” it says slowly, “are pines.”  
It had said it before, but it only made sense now. Pines. I saw my own hands scooping up piles of dried needles and tossing them on someone I can’t remember. They have no face, no features, no voice, no name.  
“How do you know what pines are?” I ask.  
It shrugs its shaggy shoulders. “I am the god of the dead.”

“They’re pines,” I tell you when you come back to my spot on the hill with rabbits slung over your shoulder, a satisfied smile on your face. You toss them at my feet, and we skin them together as the low sun sinks behind the mountains, sky so deep it is almost black.  
“That’s not very descriptive,” you say, looking up at the towering trees. “Pines. It doesn’t tell me anything.”  
“The black dog told me.”  
“But creating things doesn’t seem like it’s…” You wave a hand around. “Thing.”  
Rabbit eyes glitter in the grass behind you, watching me as I slide the stone knife across their kin’s neck, blood running into the grass. “Maybe it’s dead.”  
“Of course it’s dead, it’s the god of death. And didn’t you say it’s face was rotting off?”  
“No, the word, not the dog. ‘Pines.’ I think it’s a dead word.”  
“You would be the one to use dead words,” you say, and you’re grinning at me, and I pull back the fur of the rabbit in my hands, laying it out in the grass.

The nights are cold now, and you sew together deer and rabbit skins with long strings of sinew, and we wrap it around our shoulders as we lay by the fire, and you’re warm against me.  
You wake up before me in your excitement, hauling me up by the arms (and you’re taller than me but I can carry more than you,) singing a song about how you don’t like the word pines, but you want to explore them. With me.  
We both feel the overwhelming pressure when we walk into the woods, a weight that lays on our hearts, a silence that muffles the sound beneath our feet. It is suffocating, and you don’t say anything, but I can see it in your eyes.  
The pines are silent. There is no birdsong, no wind, no sounds of deer or rabbits or any kind of life moving between the trees. It is dark here, the black leaves blocking out the dim sunlight. You are uneasy, your hand gripping your spear, knuckles turning white. I realize that it’s hard to breathe, like fingers closing around my lungs, and our breath comes quick and shallow.  
You’re never afraid. Not even when the shadows come.  
But you’re grabbing my hand now and you won’t let go.  
The forest floor is a never-ending bed of brown, needle-like leaves, fallen from the pines above, but I trip on something, a smooth, gray stone, slick with moss. When I look down, I realize there’s more, so many of them, scattered across the forest, and many of them are huge, pushing out of the needles like water tree roots. The shapes of them are unnatural, too sharp, too flat. You’re standing on top of one, craning to see something deep in the trees, trying to get a little extra height, and I suddenly realize what I’m looking at, and it feels like cold water is running through my blood.  
“Blue,” I say, and my throat is tight. “They’re altars.”

  
Your eyes are wide as you look at the rock you just jumped from, unnaturally smooth yet crumbling with age. Symbols neither of us can read are carved into its surface, their messages hidden by age and moss.  
I feel myself shaking as I look at all the stones around us, some of them just barely there, worn by the ages, but all the same, and there’s so many, more than we can see, more than we can count.  
You run your fingers over the symbols, and I can see in your face that you desperately wish you could read it. “There’s no water here,” you whisper.  
“It can’t be mine,” I reply. “No one builds altars to death.”  
The woods feel like they are closing in around us, and it is hard to breathe.  
“Gray, do you think there is a third god?”  
And you turn to look at me, and I’m scared of what I see in your eyes.  
I’m terrified, because you are.  
And suddenly, we don’t believe that we are alone.

“I want to find it,” you say quietly.  
You’ve been quiet for a long time, using your spear as a walking stick to avoid tripping over the crumbling remains of more altars. There are so many of them, enough for entire villages of people to have their own to pray at, littering the forest floor, so…ancient. The word slides into my mind, even though I didn’t know it was missing, and I’m overwhelmed with how much time has passed in this world before we came along. I suddenly know that trees grow wider as they age, and the pines are so big we can wrap our arms around them and our fingers will not touch, and some of the trees have pushed up from underneath the stones, and I feel tired thinking about how old they must be.  
How many creatures like us must have lived here when these trees were young, carving these stones smooth from the young mountains, praying to old gods that may not still exist?  
The light is fading, and it seems to never last as long as it did the day before now, and you are looking through the trees for safety, before the shadows appear.  
“We need to find a place to sleep,” you say, the strain in your voice easy to hear. You lead me through the trees, looking desperately for something, anything, that may provide us shelter.  
All there is is pines and altars, as far as the eye can see.  
Yours eyes catch a glimmer of something in the forest, and I can hear you inhale deeply, and your hand tightens on mine, and it’s water, a glittering lake in the middle of a clearing. You let go of me, dropping to your knees at the edge of the water, leaning down, your face almost touching the water, and you don’t say anything, but after a moment your lift your head, and I know you’ve found what you’re looking for. I don’t see anything but the reflections of the trees, but your shoulders relax, and you sit back on your legs, face up to the sky.  
When you finally turn away from the still water, you look so relieved, and you wrap yourself around me and push me into the grass at the bank, and you tell me that we’re safe here.  
I start to open my mouth to voice my concern, but the air around the lake is lit with living fire, like sparks lighting up and fading out, and they dance over the water and between the trees above our heads, a duet with the stars above us.  
On the opposite shore a shadow slinks its way towards us, and I reach for your spear, but you put your hand on mine and pull it away, and you’re calm for the first time since we came to the pines.  
“They won’t come near us tonight,” you say, and the shadow shrinks away from the dancing lights, disappearing into the woods, and I believe you.  
“I asked my god why I haven’t seen it,” you say, finally, your voice barely audible. “It told me it doesn’t rule here.”  
I feel your heart speed up.  
“Who does?” I ask.  
“The white stag.”  
Your voice is barely more than a vibration, and you don’t say anything more, you just press yourself into me, and we fall asleep this way, wrapped around one another on the lakeshore, the living fire glittering under the light of the silver moon.  
It was our last good night together.

  
The thing about forests is that sound means there is life. And where there is life, there is food.  
The pines are silent.  
There are no other plants in the forest other than the trees. The moss that creeps along the altar stones is too little to make meals of (and it tastes sour and toxic, and I feel a sick feeling inside me.) We have not eaten since we entered the forest.  
The days are not very long now, the sun not rising very high in the sky. It is growing colder, and we spend more time with the deerskin wrapped around our bare shoulders now, pressed together as we walk. The mountains are getting higher, sharper; the tops of them bare rock, free even of trees. It feels as though we must breathe in more air to keep our chests from feeling tight.  
The snow falls. I don’t know what it is, this cold, white substance falling from the low, gray clouds (and you tell me it’s beautiful but you’re looking at me,) but the black dog tells me its name, showing up just out of my sight, whispering to me something new and dead.  
“When the rain freezes, it turns into snow.” The dog holds out a huge paw. The flakes land on its fur but do not melt, like when I try to hold them, and I admire the delicate shapes against the blackness of its pelt. If it could smile, I feel that it would be. “Things die when it freezes,” it says.  
We sit with our backs against an altar, trying to shield ourselves from the cold. The deerskin isn’t quite big enough for us both, but we don’t have any more deer, so I let you have more of the fur. You’re tall, but you’re thin, and you won’t admit that, and you won’t ask, but I know that you need more warmth than I do.  
You press your face into my chest, and the fire under your skin has not dulled, but I’m tired, and I want nothing more than to go home.  
But the next morning I wake up, wrap the deerskin around your shoulders, and continue to follow you over the mountains.

  
The shadows are growing brave. The forest is dark, and they slink through the places between the trees where the light doesn’t reach, and there seems to be more now, and we are both uneasy with the snow leaving a trail of footsteps behind us.  
We don’t speak much now, the air is too hard to breathe and even harder to speak, and it’s taking all my effort to drown out the emptiness in my stomach. And we try to be as quiet as possible, but our footfalls are loud, and suddenly we’re surrounded in the blink of an eye, faster than any creature should be able to move, and I can hear it scream as you rip the pearl from one of them, and I don’t have a weapon, but I have my hands, and the heartbeat that I never get used to pulses up my arm, and I pull, and everything flashes white, and I feel like I will be sick, just for a second.  
One wraps itself around me, and fire runs up my back and down my arms, and I hear a thousand voices in my ears, whispering words I don’t understand, and you’re scrambling toward me, but you can’t move fast enough, and a wet, throaty snarl tears the shadow away from me, and it explodes into smoke that burns my eyes and lungs.  
You’re standing so still, hands empty, head not moving but eyes looking to where you’ve dropped your spear, just out of reach, and there’s a huge animal standing over me, lips curled away from huge sharp teeth, short pointed ears turning in every direction, looking for its enemy that it doesn’t know it’s defeated.  
Slowly, its lips close, and the hair on its back flattens, and it looks down at me, curiosity in its golden eyes. Its nose twitches, smelling me, clouds of breath forming ice on its face as it learns all it needs about me in that moment.  
You still don’t move.  
It yawns widely, licking its lips and turning away from me, looking into the woods, and it makes a deep sound from its throat that is so familiar to me but I don’t know from where, and I can hear footfalls in the forest.  
Another creature steps out from behind an altar, its fur darker than the one standing over me, and it looks at you, and grunts gently at its companion.  
Your breath is coming in short clouds, and your knuckles are white, and you are realizing that you are small and helpless, and you try to come to peace with your death.  
You’re eyeing them as a threat, but I can feel the heat of the male’s breath lingering on me, and I’m looking at its thick, pale fur, and I’m cold, and I’m starving (actually starving, now, I can’t remember the last time we ate, because there’s nothing in this forest, and we’re going to die out here,) and I’m wondering if I could kill it with my hands, and how long it would take for the pack to tear me apart.  
And then they’re gone, the male calling to his mate, and they disappear into the pines, as quickly as they came.  
Immediately you grab your spear, and then me, pulling me up to my feet, but you aren’t really thinking about me, you’re thinking about how empty you feel inside, and how big those creatures were.  
The tracks in the snow were easy to follow at first, but the snow came harder, blowing drifts across our path, smearing the prints until there was nothing left to follow.  
We press ourselves in the pitiful shelter that a crumbling altar gives us, my head under your chin, and there’s a horrible creeping feeling inside me that I can’t explain now, and I am entirely certain that this would be the last time I feel you breathe.

I hear them before you see them, my back turned away, but I’m much more awake than you, you’re thin, and I’m less thin.  
The creatures walk out of the woods near us, and the pale beast comes within an arm’s length of me, and his chest is stained red. In his mouth, still dripping, the leg of a deer.  
You don’t think, you just grab it from the animal’s mouth, and he lets go, the leg obviously a gift. They sit in the snow and watch us, and it was intimidating at first, but we’re hungry, and this leg is still warm, and it tastes like the sweetest fruit, given to us by the gods.  
They sit and watch us until we are done, left with nothing but bones, picked clean by starving children in a barren forest.  
At some point we fall asleep.  
When we wake up, we are warm, surrounded by fur. The snow has stopped, and the beasts are curled up around us, gazing out into the forest, always watching, always listening.  
They move when they realize we are awake, and when we hesitate to follow, they blow out their cheeks and chuff at us, urging us to keep up.  
I want to go back home, you want to follow the animals, slowly moving somewhere between the sun’s rise and its set.  
We follow the pack over the mountains, despite the snow that never seems to disappear, building up around our legs, and I can feel my feet going numb when we walk. The creatures, (we started calling them dogs; they look nothing like the black dog, but they are close enough,) dragged another deer down, from where I have no idea, and you managed to take off the skin, pulling it tight over the fire, the smoke turning it hard and stiff, the trunk of a pine lending itself to you to soften the hide.  
You test your seams, and when you’re satisfied, you pull the fur over your own head, wrapping your arms around yourself.  
“It’s better than nothing,” you say, kicking at the snow with your barely covered feet, the thin fabric of your clothes not much protection from the cold.  
We will need more deer.

We didn’t find more deer.  
The two dogs accepted us tagging along behind them, following the trails they cut through the snow, digging dens at night, yapping at us until we join them, curled up away from the bite of the wind, wrapped up in deerskin and surrounded by the deep, wet smell of dog.  
“I could get used to this,” you mumble into my shoulder. “We don’t have to work for food.” You sigh, though, after a moment, your breath warm against my skin. “There’s no water here.”  
It’s been weeks since we’ve seen water that wasn’t frozen. You drop to your knees at the banks of ponds, but nobody seems to come to you, the ice never moving, the snow never speaking.  
Mine doesn’t speak to me either, but I do not miss it when it is gone.  
We are not unused to the dogs coming and going in the night, leaving us to our own as we sleep, usually never visible when we begin to stir, but always appearing within moments, emerging from the woods like ghosts.  
I realize I’m not sure what a ghost is, but it sounds like something that would come out of the woods in the early morning, fog pouring from its mouth.  
The dogs walk with noses to the wind, smelling for food that never appears. The pines are empty, the snow before us unbroken.  
We sit on the peak of yet another impossible mountain, looking down into yet another expanse of never-ending snow-covered pines. The dogs have gone into the valley on their own, possibly to hunt. Hopefully to hunt.  
“Do you think something’s actually out there?” I ask.  
You look tired, but the snow and hunger and the thinness of the air has apparently not stifled your lust for the wandering. “We found dogs, didn’t we?”  
“Do you think there’d be things like us, though?”  
“There’s a third god, isn’t there?”  
“That doesn’t mean it has a follower.”  
You’re quiet for a moment. “I want to know.”  
“And if we die before we know?”  
You shrug. “Many things die in the woods.”  
“Animals, Blue. Not us.”  
“Aren’t we animals?” You look over at me, and your eyes are almost gray. “Why does that bother you? You’re the one with the death god over your shoulder.”  
“I didn’t decide to be the black dog’s toy,” I growl. “I don’t like the thought of dying.” I’m not particularly fond of the idea of you dying, either, but I don’t say it.  
“Everything dies eventually,” you said, leaning back against a tree, your voice so much calmer than I feel, “It’s what keeps life going.”  
Your words don’t make me feel better. I can almost feel the black dog, just around the corner, waiting in the woods for us to finally stop walking, our bodies finally running out of warmth. And maybe it’s because I can see the darkness under your eyes, or the fact that you’ve been walking slower these days, or if it is because that is how you are, but you lean your head on my shoulder and close your eyes, and I wish I could be as at peace with my own existence as you.  
My chest hurts, and it isn’t from the air. “Will it be worth it, though? Dying slowly in the woods?”  
“I think so, because I’ll have lived first.”

We fall asleep, there against that tree, leaning on your shoulder, the sun finally breaking through the clouds a bit, sitting low in the sky, and the snow wasn’t even dripping from the trees, but it had been so long since we’d felt it on our faces, and the wind in the trees lulled us, and we did not resist.  
I had hoped that we’d wake up gently in one another’s arms, but instead I was bolted upright by a screech ripping its way through the valley, bouncing off the nearby mountains. The horrible scream of a dying animal, low and throaty.  
The only animals we know of are our dogs, and neither of us, I think, would like to spend the next night drying their hides. Their tracks are easy to follow, weaving through the trees, in no particular direction. Suddenly, though, they start off a direction, straight as an arrow, and I see the prints of something, some large beast, and the dogs have walked in its path, seeking their prey.  
We follow the trail, packing the snow down further, and we can hear the cry of an injured dog, and we start jogging, trying to reach them before it’s too late.  
We run into them halfway, the female leading, the pale dog following a ways behind, a whine I can only just hear pouring from his mouth in clouds. The female’s right shoulder is dripping blood onto the snow, the tawny fur stained dark and red, and jutting from her thick coat is a long, slender spear, with feathers tied around its end.  
She presses her face into your shoulder, and you take the spear in one hand, pulling it out in one smooth motion. Fresh blood pours down her arm; the wound is deep, and she is already weak.  
You’re holding the spear in your hand. It is obviously not made by any creature we have seen in the woods - the shaft is perfectly smooth, sharpened to a narrow point, and the feathers are not tied, but set into the wood itself.  
“Who did this to you?” you ask the dog, and she looks over her shoulder at the forest from where she came.  
The pale dog paces across the path carved into the snow, constantly smelling the air, obviously uncomfortable. Whatever had injured his packmate was still out there.  
“No animal made this,” you say, standing up, the spear in your hand. “Someone’s in these woods.”  
The pale dog is excited when you stand, because he thinks that we are leaving, moving far away from this threat that has caused him so much injury, and the disappointment and worry is visible in his face when we begin to follow the trail of bright red blood deeper into the valley.

I don’t know what I expected we would find in that valley, buried in snow almost to our waists, following a trail of dog’s blood into fading light, but I wasn’t expecting a complete dead end.  
The trail of the dogs’ footprints spread out from their trail, trying to circle around something that had no footprints. The pale dog had moved to the left, the female to the right. There wasn’t much blood here, only a few large drops, but it was obvious that she had fallen and thrashed when she’d been hit, then scattered prints as the two of them ran back to the packed snow trail to escape.  
“There’s nothing here,” I say, looking at the unbroken snow in the center of the circle the dogs would have made. It’s deep, glittering in the low sunlight, completely untouched. There hasn’t been snow in days, so I know that it is not simply covered. It seems that a ghost has attacked our dogs.  
Then, suddenly, there’s a sound like something falling from a great height, and the pale dog yelps and jumps back. In the snow near where his feet had been was another feathered spear, quivering slightly.  
You immediately grab your knife and take a defensive stance, and I drop to my knees behind a tree. The forest is quiet, as it always is.  
The dogs turn tail, darting into the woods, unwilling to join a fight they had already suffered injury from.  
Another spear slams into a tree behind me, well above my head, and I jump to the side. I meet your eyes - the still-quivering sliver of wood had come from behind a large, mostly intact stone altar nearby.  
I pull the spear from the tree and creep around the altar as quietly as we could, which wasn’t very quiet at all, with the snow so deep.  
You reach the altar first, and lead with your spear, jabbing at whatever is behind it before you hiss into its face, “Who are yo-”  
And your words immediately turn into a swear, and I’ve never heard the word before but I know by the way that you say it that this is reserved for only extreme moments, and you nearly drop your spear before I see what you’re looking at, and my heart stops, just for a second.  
Pressed against the altar, a strange yet dangerous looking weapon in its hand, pointing at your face, is another one of us, a...person, wearing deerskin, most of their face obscured with a thick fur hood, the snow around it splattered with dark blood that poured from the ugly hole where its eye used to be.  
“It’s red…” you whisper, and you suddenly don’t know what to do.  
They’re still pointing its strange weapon at your face. “What?” The word doesn’t sound like when you or I say it, the sounds are all wrong, but somehow I still understand it.  
“Your eye,” you say, your words clumsy.  
“Yeah? What about it?”  
“It’s….” Your wave your free hand over your face.  
“Gone?”  
“Yeah.”  
“Thanks for noticing.”  
There’s a pause. “Are you okay?”  
“I’m alive.”  
My legs are about to give out, but I can’t show that I am afraid, and I drop to my knees. “You’re bleeding a lot.”  
The other person jerks around, the movement causing fresh blood to drip down their cheek. Now the weapon is pointed at me, and I can see it clearly - a thin tree branch with a thin cord, and one of the feathered spears was set in the center, pulled back against the string.  
“There’s more of you?” They ask.  
“Just us,” I say.  
They pull the cord tighter. “Why are you here?”  
Your voice drops. “You stabbed our dog.”  
“Your what?”  
“Dog. Big, furry animal, little ears, sharp teeth, smells like wet mud?” You hold out your hands to indicate the relative size of the pale dog to you - its head level with your shoulders.  
The person on the ground tilts their head. “Wolves?”  
You look up at me, repeating the word. “Wolves?”  
I shrug. “I have no idea what a wolves is.”  
You look back at the person on the ground. “What is 'wolves'?”  
“Apparently what you call dogs,” they grumble.  
They lean back against the altar, taking a deep breath. “Are you going to kill me and get it over with or are we gonna sit here and chat while I die slowly?”  
There is a lot of blood on the snow around them, and I realize that their face is crusted with it, and the fur of their deerskin shirt is matted, and still more drips out of their eye every time they move, and I think about the rabbits whose necks we slice open, and that this new person probably only has so much blood before they too, stop moving.  
And you’re looking at them, horrified, because you never had any intention of killing them, and they’re just looking at you, and their skin is dark, darker than either of ours, but there’s a grayness underneath their skin, and a dimness in the remaining eye they have.  
You ask then where they live, and they laugh, because why would they ever tell you? But then they sigh, pushing themselves back up to a sitting position, and they have given up hiding the pain they’re in, and they realize that it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if we steal their belongings and run - either way, they’re dead. You give me a look and I know that if you can help it, you won’t let them die.  
They are not much more than bones when I pick them up, and they are light in my arms despite being much larger than I am, and they give me directions in a tired voice to a den made of green branches, bowed over in the snow, covered in deerskin. They don’t say anything when I lay them down inside, they just roll over on their side, away from me, their breathing shallow.  
I leave them be.  
You revive a long-dead fire from half-burned branches in a pile of ashes ringed in stone, prodding at the embers with a green stick, watching it smoke. From the woods behind you, I can see the glittering eyes of the dogs, having followed us just out of view, making sure their attacker would not strike again.  
You look up at me when I sit down, and your eyes follow from my face to my chest, to the dried up blood running a trail down my belly. Your expression is one of pain, and I wonder if you’ve forgotten that it isn’t mine.  
We watch the fire together for a while, watching the sun dip behind the mountains, and the air around us grows frigid, and I wish you’d have made me a shirt of fur like your own.  
“Do you think they’re gonna die, Gray?” You ask me, your eyes distant.  
I stare into the fire. “I don’t know.”  
“I wish you could make it go away.” I know what ‘it’ you mean, and I look into the trees, but I see nothing.  
“I thought that many things die in the woods. That death is what makes life keep going.”  
You give me a look as cold as the air around us. “I just don’t want them to die.”  
“You do not want the stranger we have not even known a day to die, but you seemed just fine with the idea of my freezing to death.” I can feel my face growing hot.  
“I never meant I was okay with it,” you grumble.  
“Then what did you mean?”  
You don’t reply. You just go back to twirling your twig in the fire, watching it smoke.  
I walk away from you, into the woods, to the pale dog, and I run my fingers in his fur, feeling his heat against my hands. He smells like wet earth, and I miss the warm shores of our grassy field, and our rabbits and our rams which surely by now have fallen under some hunter’s claws.  
I want to go home. I am tired of the pines and the snow and the cold. We found your other person, your evidence of another god. It’s time to let the forest be.  
And yet I find myself watching you, sitting by the fire, letting your green twig burn, looking at the deerskin den with worry on your face, and I hate the way you look right now; it’s like knives in my chest.  
I close my eyes, breathing out a cloud of smoke.  
“I know you’re here.”  
The smell of burning surrounds me. “You’re learning.”  
The black dog’s teeth click together, and it feels like it’s smiling. I can’t help but hate it. I hate that I am tied to it, and I hate what it means.  
It notices that I’m watching you through the trees. “Your mate looks upset.”  
“Our new companion is dying,” I say, but I know it already knows.  
“Hmm, it is, isn’t it. A pity. Or is it cause for celebration?” It tilts its head to the side. “I guess it’s all in how you look at it.”  
“This isn’t enjoyable,” I growl.  
“You aren’t looking at it the right way, little one. When something dies a lot of other somethings can be born. A soul’s freedom from the suffering of life. It’s not always an ending.”  
“Does their ending have to be now?”  
The dog looks at the den of furs. “All beasts have an end.”  
“Blue came here just for them.”  
I can feel the dog’s nonexistent eyes on me. “Ah.”  
I don’t like the way its voice sounds, like it understands something I do not.  
“The dark-skinned one was supposed to die, you know. The forest has no more purpose for it.”  
“There is nothing for us to gain from their death.”  
“Isn’t there?”  
I don’t reply.  
The black dog looks from me to you again, dripping its black saliva into the snow. “Do not mess with the world’s order too much, small fry. That’s what got us here in the first place.”  
I look up to ask it what it means, but it’s gone.  
I walk back to the fire, and you don’t look at me, and I don’t say anything to you. I dig out a space for me in the snow, near the warm flame, and I lay down to sleep. It doesn’t take long before I’m joined by the two dogs, and I’m pleased to see the female has cleaned off most of the blood on her shoulder.  
You don’t join us.  
I lay with the dogs for several minutes, the sensation coming back to my hands with an intense burning, and I am trying to relax, matching my breathing to the dogs’, when I hear you gasp.  
“Gray, look.”  
I open my eyes and look at you, and you’re looking up at the sky, your mouth open, and when I roll over to follow your gaze, the air rushes out of my chest before I can catch myself, because the sky is lit up in ribbons of green and gold and red, dancing across the sky like fire.  
You ask me what I think it is, and I don’t know, but there’s a creeping feeling in my skin, and I can hear a soft scraping sound, like dragging through the snow, and even though the night passes uneventful, I do not sleep.

When I wake up, it is still dark, a line of gold barely showing behind the sharp mountain peaks. I sit up, looking around, and I see you sitting next to the fire, and for a moment I think that I have only been asleep a few moments, but I can feel that time has passed. The emptiness in my stomach has grown painful.  
I walk up to the fire, but I do not sit down.  
“I don’t want to check on them,” you say, almost to yourself. “I don’t think I am good at this sort of thing like you are.”  
I have always done the dirty work of injuries. Boars, their giant tusks so sharp and long they gore out their own eyes, often found their way to our home, attacking anything and everything that made sounds in fits of blind rage. A ewe was unfortunate enough to be in the way, once, and your face lost its colour, and I had to drag the two halves of her body away so that you wouldn’t have to look at it, cutting what meat I could away from her bones so as not to waste her. When I told you later that she had lambs inside her, I thought you might be sick.  
I hold my hands over the fire, trying to retain a small amount of warmth before turning to the den and pushing the deerskin back and peering inside.  
I won’t lie and say that I’m not surprised to see them sitting up, covering the hole in their face with both hands.  
They glare at me with their one remaining eye, as green as the needles on the pines. “What do you want?”  
“Checking to see if you were dead,” I reply.  
I can hear them breathe in, but they do not say anything. They pull their hands away from their wound, and I see now that they have been pressing snow to it, using the water it melted into to clean the dried blood from their face. Their eyelid does not open all the way, hanging limply over the hole, not quite closed, but unable to fully open, but it is no longer bleeding.  
I catch myself staring.  
“Yes?” They ask, their voice threatening.  
“Nothing,” I murmur, and I leave them alone.

The dogs disappear in a vain attempt to find prey, and the sun has still not risen. I’m starting to grow frightened, the silence of the forest far too loud, and my head is throbbing in the absence of sound, and every movement you make makes me twitch.  
“Where do you think the sun went?” You ask me.  
I shrug. “Maybe it went somewhere warmer.”  
“The sun doesn’t rise sometimes,” comes a third voice, the sound of crunching snow behind us.  
The stranger sits down across from us. They’ve pulled the hood of their shirt down, and I can see their face more clearly now, and that they have deliberately pulled their long black hair over their ruined eye, but the deep purple blood under their skin betrays the injury.  
They lean on their knees. “It doesn’t set for a long time, either.”  
You look at them through the fire as though you are looking at the dead. “You’ve seen it before?”  
The stranger nods. “I woke up here when the sun was hidden.”  
“How do you know when it’s night or day?”  
“You don’t.”  
“If you have seen the sun disappear twice now, you’ve been here for a while, haven’t you?” You seem eager to talk to them, more eager than you have been to talk to me lately.  
They don’t reply, just blow air through their nose in a sound of affirmation.  
You look around you, at the emptiness in the forest. “Is it always so dead?”  
“Only when it snows,” they say, and look at me. “I am not surprised you show up just as the sun dies.”  
My skin prickles. “I did not kill the sun or your forest.”  
They give me a smile, but it isn’t like your smiles, it is sharp, like the black dog’s. “Are you sure? Your colour is like death itself.”  
“You are the one with a missing eye, not me.”  
There is a silence that feels dangerous, and I do not think that I like this stranger very much.  
“So do you have a name?” You ask, breaking the moment, and they turn away from me, and look at you.  
“I never needed a name here by myself,” they reply.  
“Well we’re here now, so you should have a name. We’ll call you Red.” Your eyes are bright, and something in my stomach feels ill. “It’s the first thing I saw when we met.”  
You are talking about the blood on their face, and I think that Red knows this, and their eye narrows, but they do not object.

The dogs return from their search with nothing in their mouths, and the sun never rises. Red does not trust the dogs, “They will sooner tear out your throats than sleep with you,” they say, staring the pale dog in its eyes, and neither turn away from the other, and when the female comes to greet them, Red pushes her away, and I notice that the deerskin they’re wearing isn’t deer at all.  
Red does not invite us to stay, but we have nowhere else to go, and when we grow tired they have food, buried under the snow, and we haven’t eaten in days, and I want to go home, but I don’t know if home is even there anymore.  
You ask them about the forest, about what we are eating (and it is dog, and I toss our companions some of the meat and I apologize to them, but I do not know if they understand me, or what it even means,) and about the snow, your eyes bright as stars, like you have not spoken to anyone in moons (and this hurts.)  
And you ask about their god, and Red laughs, but it is not a laugh of joy.  
“I tried to kill my god,” They spit.  
Your mouth falls open.  
Red’s voice carries venom with it, like the black liquid from the black dog’s mouth. “The gods are cowards, and mine is the green prince of all cowards. He’s the one who opened the tear.”  
“The what?”  
Red looks at you, and their eyes are full of something that is almost like pity. “They didn’t tell you.”  
“Tell me what?”  
“Why you’re here.”  
“Isn’t this just where we are?”  
Red shook their head, and laughed that same joyless laugh.

The stag has poisoned the world with shadows, and it is dying, slowly, and painfully. There is already little life, and the winter could destroy what is left.  
“Unless,” Red says, “I fix it.”  
“Fix it?”  
“The hole in the world that the stag opened. He tried to use the energy of others worlds to heal this one, but he made a mistake. And instead of solving his problems on his own, he pulled me away from our world and told me I had to close the hole.”  
“Is this where the hole is?” You ask, looking around you at the darkness.  
“No.”  
“Then why are you here?” You push yourself off of the stone you are sitting on with your hands. “The shadows are still out there. You need to close the hole.”  
Red narrowed their eye. “Why.”  
You are caught off guard. “Because…”  
“Because the gods told me to? To save the world?”  
You don’t know how to answer.

You sit by the fire that night (night? It is always night and I only say it is night because we are tired,) with your eyes worlds away from here.  
“Why won’t Red close the hole in the world?” Your voice is quiet, and I can barely hear you.  
“Only Red knows.”  
You are quiet for many heartbeats. “If it stays open, the shadows will keep coming.”  
“Probably.”  
“I don't want that to happen.”  
You look up at me, at the lines across my arms, and the lines that run along them still, where the shadow wrapped itself around me.  
“I can't let that happen. Not again.”

“We are going to close the the hole.”  
You are standing with your spear in the snow, your other hand on your hip, staring into Red's eyes with that same determination I saw when you told me we were going to cross the mountains and see what was beyond them.  
Red stared back at you, unblinkingly. The hole where their eye had been was crusted over, but green fire burned out of the one that was left.  
“If you follow the sun all you will find is a cliff that falls into to the belly of the world.”  
“Where is the hole?” Your voice is hard.  
“On the other side of the cliff.”  
And you turn away to leave, and I put my feet in the holes you leave, and I will follow you to the ends of the world, but Red calls you back, and tells you that you will freeze to death, but you do not turn around.  
And I can see it in your face that you want to turn around, and it hurts, and I don’t know why, to see you wish that Red were with us, and I can’t help but be a little happy, deep inside, that we are leaving the forest god’s child behind.

The pines are dark and silent, and it is difficult to see ahead of us, and we are stumbling over altars buried under snow, and we are growing tired in the cold, and the ground ahead of us is leaning ever upward, toward the jagged-topped mountains that seem to never peak.  
You make a fire, not because we are sleepy, but because we are cold, and we cannot see, and we need to take a rest, and the fire is warm, and the dogs’ eyes glow from just beyond the light.  
You open your bag, and you are looking for food, and you have some, that you said you’ve taken from Red without asking, and I feel warmer inside when you say this. Your hand touches one of the shadows’ pearls, and you take it out, looking at it, turning it in your hand.  
You look at the light is casts on your hand, and you wonder if it could light our way, and I have a sour feeling about it in my stomach, but I don’t say anything as you stand up and walk out into the darkness, holding the pearl in front of you, the dim red light barely enough for me to see, but you turn around and smile at me, as though it is the solution we’ve been looking for.  
You pick up another one, shaking them both, trying to make them brighter, and you tap the two together, trying to make a spark, and the sound is like the voices of angels and I can’t breathe for just a moment, and it echoes through the trees, bouncing off the mountainside.  
And you look at me, and you are looking behind me, and I can see your eyes widen, and I can see them behind you, and they seem to be created from the darkness itself, and they’re whispering and I can’t understand it.  
You take three and I take one (and I’m running the entire time,) and the pain is hot and white and it burns my mind and my eyes when I rip the pearl from them and when I open my eyes again the world is black and white and gray. The shadows are asking me to leave and one wraps its arms around me and it screams at me to leave but it hurts and I don’t know where to go, and it gets dark in my eyes, and I think that I am leaving you, and then its pearl shatters, and I drop into the snow.  
And Red is pulling the thin branch back against their cheek, and letting it go, and their shot flies wild, and you are grabbing a piece of wood from the fire and throwing it at the shadows, and they run like rabbits from a reaching hand, slinking just outside of the firelight.  
Red asks you what happened, and they are breathing clouds of frost into the air, and you point to the pearls, and Red’s one good eye widens, and they are angry, and I know, even if I cannot see them.  
The shadows are brave, moving into the circle of firelight, begging us to leave, reaching with their wispy hands, toward the pearls.  
Toward the pearls.  
Red grabs one of the shining red gems and throws it against the altar you built your fire on, and it shatters, and I can feel the shadows around us cry out in sorrow and rage, and they step closer, and Red smashes another, and I can’t speak, and when I try to stand up it feels like knives in my head, and I fall again, and you don’t notice me, and I can’t see you..  
“Why won’t you listen?” The shadow says, wrapping its arms around me, pressing its face into mine.

I open my eyes and I see the black dog, standing over me, looking into me with the empty, smoking holes in its skull.  
“Hey there small fry,” it says, and some of the black saliva drips onto my leg, but I can’t feel it. I can’t feel anything but my head, and it hurts, like someone is smashing it with a tree branch.  
“You’re not doing so hot, are you?” The dog asks, tilting its head. “You’ve gone all sour inside.”  
I try to sit up, but the dog puts a paw on my shoulder, holding me down.  
“Your packmate was supposed to die, you know.” Its voice is no longer friendly. “You begged it to live, but now everything's out of balance.”  
“Blue…” is all i can say.  
“Your mate, yes, well you know sometimes one half of a pair dies, and the other goes on, right? That’s life.”  
“I don't…”  
“Oh no, no beast does. And you are convinced your mate needs you; you don’t have to tell me, I know how it goes. But you don’t need to worry, you will live again. We still have need of you,” the black dog says. “Just remember: you cannot take death away from me forever.”

I woke up and I was warm, and I thought that maybe we were home again, the sun on our skin, the grass under our feet. But I felt the fur against my arms, the cold of the snow around me, and when I sit up, it is hard to breathe, and hard to think.  
And when I open my eyes the fire is white and Red’s face is black and you are wrapping yourself around me, and I can feel your arms shaking.  
And your eyes are so gray.  
And it feels like poison inside me, (poison, poison, a ewe ate some once, a plant that made her guts turn to liquid and I’m scared that’s happening to me,) and my head hurts, the new white lines across my arms wrapped in deerhide (you say that Red brought it, and you made it fit me, and I am thankful.)  
The fire is burning strong, and there are no shadows. You tell me that they all disappeared as you shattered the pearl of the one crouching over me, and all I can hear is their voices in my mind.  
“They want us to leave,” I say, trying to look at you, but it’s so hard to see.  
“The shadows?”  
Red snorts. “Of course it wants us to leave, our world is alive.”  
I can’t think of anything else to say, because Red is probably right, and I don’t want to admit it. I can see you staring at Red again, and I can feel that familiar sourness in my throat, but I try to push it down as I wrap my arms around myself, and I can feel that this is dog that I am wearing, the skins wrapped around my arms and legs and feet, and I can finally feel them again.  
“Why are you here?” I ask, and it is angry, and I didn’t mean it to be, but I am not sorry.  
Red looks down at me with one good eye narrowed. “You’d be dead if I wasn’t.”  
And Red walks away, pulling thin spears from the ground where they had fallen and tucking them back into the pouch on their back, walking away from us, but never leaving.  
You try to talk to Red, your back turned to me, but they do not want to talk, and you sleep next to me that night, but it doesn’t feel the same.  
And when we wake up to darkness again, the world is still gray.

You do not ask Red to stay, but they walk with us anyway, and you want to talk, and I miss the quiet we used to have, and my head is always hurting. You walk next to me, our arms barely touching, and you lay with me at night, your head on my shoulder, but your eyes look at Red, and the things you say to me are just words made of frost in cold air.  
And Red does not speak to me at all, but for you, they will tell what they know of the mountains, of the hole, of the shadow, of their god, and sometimes you turn to look at me, behind you, and your face is smiling but I see nothing in your eyes.  
And the pines fall away, and there is nothing but rock and snow around us, and the sun never rises, and the ocean is so far behind us, and all I can do is follow you forward, and there is a sound like a breeze in my head, and I can feel the shadows watching us from just outside our vision, and the more we walk, the louder it gets, and I can hear the shadows begging us to leave, but you don’t believe me, so I do not say anything.  
And we go over the mountains.  
But only because we cannot go around them.

“We’re here,” Red says, staring out over the peak of a mountain, the wind whipping their black hair around their face. It is wild here, snow flying in our eyes, the air dangerously thin.  
And just past Red’s feet, the ground disappears. The mountains split in two, the rift left behind dropping thousands of fathoms into the belly of the planet, nothing but blackness stretching as far as we can see below our feet. The land across from the rift looks much like the one we are standing on, but I can feel it in my belly that nothing is alive over there, and the ground is dead.  
And I follow Red’s hand with my eyes, and it plays tricks on me at first, and I don’t know what I’m seeing, but I step to the side and the hole in the universe glitters into view, like cutting a hole in a leaf with your fingernail, like a perfect doorway that doesn’t belong, a piece of gray dirt, suspended in the air.  
And there are shadows all around us, and I can hear their whispers in my head, and we cannot see them, but I can feel them, and they are all begging us to leave.  
I can’t tell you, because you won’t believe me, because Red won’t believe me. And my head hurts, and the wind is cold and relentless here, howling over the mountain peaks like dogs on the hunt.  
“How do you reach it?” you ask, looking at the place where the world disappears.  
Red’s eye does not leave the hole. “You don’t.”

“Is that why you did not close the tear?” You ask around the dog you are eating, the firelight turning your face silver.  
“No,” Red replies. “I could if I wanted to. I could ask the stag to make a bridge over the gap and pinch it closed with my fingers and it would disappear. I just don’t want to.”  
“Why? Don’t you want to get rid of the shadows?”  
“Then what happens? We go home? We die?“ This world is dying anyway. The sun is weak, the creatures are broken and black like death. The gods only want us to fix their mistakes so that they can live a little longer, but they will die just like the rest of us eventually.” Red looks at me, the light of the fire on their skin the only thing I can see. “Surely you can feel it, pawn of death.”  
“Why do you keep thinking I control death?” I ask, the skin on my neck prickling.  
“Because your colour is black like the dead.”  
“I am no pawn.”  
“Aren’t you?”  
“I don’t control death, and I don’t enjoy killing anything. I just see the black dog.”  
“And you speak to it, do you not?”  
And I hear a whisper in my mind, like a dog’s howl, so faint it may have been the wind. “I don’t enjoy it.”  
“You don’t have to enjoy it.”  
And suddenly I feel helpless.  
“That is what I hate, that feeling,” Red says, and they can see it in my face. “Why do we do this? Because we have to. Because the gods told us so. I did not ask to be brought here to serve gods I don’t know.”  
And I hate myself, because I hate Red, but I agree with them, and I can see in your eyes that you do not.

When I wake up the sky is black and the fire is white, and the place where you lay in the snow (your back to me,) is empty, and Red is not awake, and the pale dog is lying against my back, only one set of footprints returning from the forest, and one set leading away from the fire, and they are not dog footprints, and my chest is cold as I’m crawling to my feet, and the pale dog next to me startles awake, looking around in the darkness.  
I follow your trail to the tear in the sky, and you don’t see me, and you’re praying to your god, and I don’t know why, because there is no water here, and your voice travels on the thin cold air, and you are begging for help, your spear gripped in your hands.  
I step out to go to you, to hold you, to tell you that we can just go home, and we will die with the world, together, like we were always supposed to, and I can’t see you but you’re crying, and you never cry.  
Then the ground shakes like a thousand horses (horses, they are like deer but bigger and heavier and I’ve never seen one in my life,) and fire erupts from the hole in the center of the world, and you fall to your knees, and you’re crawling backwards, because the fire is falling all around you like rain, and the mountains are bright and white, and you turn and you see me, and your eyes are so wide.  
And the shadows are crying, I can hear them, the fire pouring through the hole in the sky into the world, and they want me to make it stop, but I can’t, and you’re running into me, and you’re terrified, and you’re never scared, and the fire is beginning to bubble up from the center of the rift, pouring over its edges and covering the ground where you were standing only moments ago, and we’re running, back to Red.  
And there’s a sound like I’ve never heard, all the shadows at once, and every living creature in this world and theirs dying in unison, and everything is white, white, white, and it hurts, and I can feel the mountains tearing into my knees and my hands and I’m falling and you’re trying to hold me but I am bigger than you and you are barely more than bones and it won’t stop, it won’t stop. I hear you screaming over the noise, and when I turn around I see it, through the fire in the hole in the sky, a massive shadow, bigger than us, bigger than the pines, and it’s pouring through the hole, reaching for us, its pearl as big as Red is, and it’s casting light around us, and it reaches for your face, its hands made of smoke.  
It just touches you, just on your face, and your eyes, already wide with panic, suddenly grow narrow, your body goes stiff, and I’ve felt that before, like poison in your mind, and I can’t think, I just grab your spear from your limp hands, pushing with all my strength into the glittering pearl in the creature’s chest.  
And it doesn’t shatter, but it chips, just a little, and I can feel the burning behind my eyes, and I thrust into it again, and it chips again, and I can feel it turn to me, but it’s still holding onto you. It wraps part of itself around me, trying to hold me back, but I push the spear into the hole again and again, and more and more chips away, and it hurts, it hurts more than anything has before, the shadow pushing itself into me, and I can feel heat like a dying sun around me, and I can hear your voice, like a whisper in my ear, and I reach out because you are next to me, but there is nothing.  
The liquid fire is pooling around us slowly, like hot mud, and I feet hot in my furs. I can see the colour drain from your face (it’s so pale, white like the snow,) and you are going to leave me, and I push the end of your spear into the fire, and it lights in my hands, and I push it as hard as I can into the pearl, and everything goes white, just for a moment. And when I open my eyes again, spiderweb lines are splitting across the pearl, and you are falling to the ground, and the shadow is reaching for me now, but I don’t care.  
I don’t care.  
It grabs me, and I can hear it growling in my mind, but I can see Red pulling back the string on their weapon, and suddenly I don’t feel anything anymore, and I’m falling as the shadow writhes in pain, fire crawling up its back.  
And I can barely walk, but I’m grabbing you, and the fire is burning everything inside out, consuming the hole in the sky from where it came.  
And your eyes aren’t looking at anything, and your face is so white, and the only thing I know to do is to find water.

But there is no water, and your eyes don’t move, and you don’t speak, and we are running out of time.  
The fire follows us, slowly now, but steadily, and Red says that when it reaches the pines it will light the forest on fire, and I have never seen a tree burn, but I have seen a shadow burn, and I am terrified, and you are not here to calm me.  
Your chest rises so slow, so lightly, and you are so pale.  
I can feel the black dog creeping behind me, just out of my vision, waiting for you to leave me, and I can’t let that happen. I am scared. I am more scared than I have been in my life. And I need you to make me not scared, because you’re never scared, but you’re lying in the snow and you can’t say anything to me.  
I need water. I can’t see your god but you’re all I have, and Red is trying to talk to me, but I can’t hear them, and I’m grabbing at the snow, trying to turn it into water with my hands, whispering prayers to the god that can’t hear me.  
And Red puts a hand on my hand, and I feel the black dog put a paw on my back, and I hear your voice, sweet like a song, whispering through the trees.  
“Bring them back,” I say, and my throat is tight.  
“I can’t,” the black dog says.  
“You’ve done it before.”  
“Life cannot exist without death, small one. When one thing lives, another must die.”  
I turn to face the dog. “Then take me in their place.”  
Its head sinks to its chest, a sorrowful gesture, a show of emotion I have never seen. “I cannot.”  
“Why not?”  
The world can only take one life for another so many times before it demands what it is owed. You are not the same mixture of spirit and mass as your mate, or as your one-eyed companion, or the creature you call a dog. You will not fill the same space as any of them, and the balance will be disrupted...it can fix itself, but it takes time. You have already begged for their life once, and the world is dying already. To do it again would be even more unnecessary devastation.”  
Fire burns inside of me, like someone is tearing my chest open. “What is the point of being death if I can’t give someone life?”  
The dog looks beyond me, at something I cannot see, something in its own mind, deep in the pines. “Death does not give anything but peace to the dying.”  
I’m looking at you, and you do not look peaceful, and my chest hurts, and my head hurts, and my eyes burn, and I am empty.  
If that is all I can give, then so be it.

The sun doesn’t rise the next morning, as Red and I walk down the mountain, away from the fire spewing from the depths of the planet, away from the hole in the sky.  
I can almost hear your voice, telling me that we still need to close the hole, to save the world, but there is nothing left here to care about. The world will die, and I will die with it.  
We walk until we find the altars, and I can feel the presence of people around me, hundreds, thousands, whispering to me, and they are saying they are sorry, we’re sorry, we’re sorry. And I look at the altars again, and the words on them are names, and I can’t read them but I know, that they are the names of the long-dead citizens of this world, and they are sorry, so sorry, because I have lost in the greatest way.  
“They are graves,” Red says next to me.  
“We thought they were altars.”  
“No person loves their god this much.”

The sun does come back, a glow of red (or so Red tells me,) on the horizon, and I can’t remember how many moons it’s been. The pines burned bright for many days, as we walked toward the ocean once again. But I didn’t want to see the ocean.  
So we built our fire in the whitewood forest, and we survived, speaking little, sleeping much. I had hoped that the fields were untouched by the cold, but snow covered everything, and the rabbits had gone into their dens, and the deer to their brush hides, but the pale dog could smell them better than we could, and we survived.  
I still blame Red for making you leave me.  
And it still hurts.  
My head aches all the time, and I cannot see out of one of my eyes. The colours have left this world with you, Blue, and now the world itself is leaving me in darkness, even though the sun has returned.  
And I survive, but I do not live.

One day I wake up and I can’t see anything. The pain in my head is unbearable, and though Red brings me food, it is like dust in my mouth.  
They sit next to me as the black dog walks up and gently places a paw on my forehead, it’s face somehow somber.  
“You have doomed us all, human. Rejoice that you get to leave before the end.”

A soft beeping sound gently coaxes me awake, and my bed is slightly uncomfortable, but I’m wrapped up in something, and the air is warm. I try to reach for the warmth, to pull myself out of the fog of sleep, and it’s like walking through mud, so thick and difficult, and I’m weak.  
I open my eyes, and the sun is in my eyes, and it stings, and I close them again. My head hurts, but a different kind of hurt, like a scratch that is healing, a dull, itching ache.  
I open my eyes again, and sit up in bed, the blankets falling around my waist. The curtains blow gently in the breeze from a fan in a corner, moving air around an almost uncomfortably warm room. Outside, I can hear voices and footsteps.  
There is no forest, no snow, no black dog. There is a plain gray duvet, a plant in a pot on the window, a flat black contraption hanging on the wall. A TV. That’s what it is. I know that because I live here. This is my house. Apartment. A kind of house stuck to other houses, high above a street. A city street. And the bottom floor is a coffee shop that has free WiFi, so I can work sort of from home.  
I run my hands along the side of my head, the shaved hairs pricking my palms, and I can feel the rough sutures holding my skin closed. The headaches were finally gone, the doctors said, it was benign but I am still colourblind, and there’s a metal plate in my head and an impressive scar to show off.  
The forest feels so far away, in another reality.  
Is this where we go when we die in the forest?  
Are you here?  
I climb out of bed, shakily walking to the window, pushing back the blinds. I am three stories high over a city street, and there are hundreds of people walking below me.

I think about you daily. I wish that I could find you, but there are so many people, and so many places someone could be at any given time. I don’t even know if Blue is really your name (and it probably isn’t, because that is not something people call themselves it seems. Gray is certainly not mine.)  
I am lonely here in my apartment in the city, and there are no shadows or boars or gods in this world, but it is terrifying in its own way, and I have nobody to hold on to. I miss holding onto you. You kept me safe.  
I need you.  
There are people I know and talk to, people I suppose that I can call my friends, but it isn’t the same. I don’t feel the same about them as I did about you there in our forest, looking up at the stars at night. I don’t know if I can tell them about the forest. It might have just been a dream; it feels like one, but it doesn’t fade like a dream, just like a memory.  
It’s lonely in the city.  
And I wonder if you think of me, wherever you are.  
There are many nights that I wish I could die again, that maybe I will wake up beside you in the next reality. There are days when I am scared to leave the house, and I wish you were there to go with me, (and these days turn into worse nights, because I want to be with you so badly and I shut myself in my room and I drink myself to sleep so I can’t think anymore.)  
I began to see someone, someone to talk to, to help me, and my bad nights are not as frequent, but I still miss you.  
How do you find someone you met in a dream? Another reality? You could be my next door neighbour, or in a country across the oceans you love so much. If you even exist at all.  
The only way I know how is to write. I write to make money to pay my rent and buy food and coffee and sometimes a movie to watch when I can’t sleep. Sometimes the things I write get published, sent around, in shops and libraries and buses, across the world. It’s still weird to think that it happens, but it’s happened a few times.  
So I wrote what I remember, and maybe you’ll pick this up in a shop, or a library, or a bus, and maybe you’ll remember too. And maybe you’ll mail me, and maybe we’ll finally find one another.  
Or maybe we won’t.  
I don’t know what to do if we don’t.  
I visit the sea, sometimes, when I have enough paper in my pockets to pay for the plane. I don’t see your god, if it is even there, but I leave it gifts, just in case.  
People go to the ocean to relax, to swim, to get tan. I go to the ocean to be close to you in the only way i know how.  
I hope one day I’ll find you here, your skin dark from the sun, your eyes bright as the water around you, your smile bright as the sun above us, and you’ll say my name in your voice like angels’ song.  
And maybe then I’ll feel whole again.

**Author's Note:**

> Follow my exploits on tumblr @cataouatche or twitter @kataouatche :)


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